Feral Foster doesn’t sound like he’s interested in polishing the rough edges off anything, least of all a love song. On “Be Mine,” his gravel-and-gospel delivery lands somewhere between Tom Waits and Eric Burdon, set against a finely tuned union of garage rock and folk blues. Its windswept lyrics give this folk-revival spark a beautifully ragged edge.
The song began taking shape on the road, with Foster drawing on the tension of unrequited desire and imagining its consequences on a much larger scale. He tells us:
‘Be Mine’ was a song I started singing to myself on tour a bunch of years ago, I had someone in mind when thinking of it. Unrequited desire that feels like it could manifest itself as catastrophic upheaval in nature.
Foster has spent more than two decades building community through Roots n’ Ruckus, the New York roots-music series he started in Manhattan in 2005 before bringing it to Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre in 2008. With New World Blues, he returns with his first new album in more than a decade, arriving October 23 via Jalopy Records.
